Help on choosing the right system for me!

[Falkon]

Hello everyone, I'm about to graduate from college soon and want to be a freelance multimedia developer. I have skills in motion fx, 3d visualization, sound design, photography, web design, graphic design, and more! I'm wanting to concentrate on being an environmental artist and matte painter for the film and game industry, as well as create architectural renderings for environmental designs. I am not a complete tech newb, however I don't really know for the types of environments or projects I'll be working on how much of what components will suffice for me since I have only been working on single scenes primarily in school of 1-3 rooms.

 

I primarily work in the entire adobe suite, 3ds Max, mental ray, vray, apple final cut pro and color, I'm considering getting vue for landscape work as well. I have a budget of about 2-4k total for everything including a decent monitor I can color correct on. I potentially may be working in maya and zbrush as well in the future if I need to future proof myself. Thanks for your time and input!

[AJLynn]

Eh crap, I wrote out a reply then accidentally navigated away! Anyway, my advice was going to be to go to http://www.3datstech.com/ and check out those options (the Midrange, but with this video card and two of this hard drive in RAID would be good for the uses you describe. The monitors on the bottom of that page are all IPS displays that will calibrate well. I like this one for the size and value and this device for calibration.

[Falkon]

HI Andrew, thanks for taking time to share those links! Do you think there would be much difference in going with 8 vs 12 gig ram, and also do you know which raid set up would be most helpful?

[AJLynn]

You can RAID 0 two drives easily using the hardware on the motherboard itself with internal hard drives - this will be explained in the motherboard manual.

 

For most people I usually say 8GB is good, but in your case, if you do a lot of video... okay, what I'd do is, instead of the memory specified, get one kit of this for 8GB. That will keep two slots free and later you can upgrade to 16GB using a second one of that kit if 8GB turns out to not be enough. Or if budget allows, get two to start, these 2x4GB kits have come waaaay down in price lately anyway. 12GB is for motherboards that have memory slots in multiples of 3, there's no compelling reason to go that way when you have a 4 slot board - though my home PC happens to have 12GB because I started with 2x2GB and later added 2x4GB when I wanted to handle enormous Photoshop files.